I spent part of last Thursday in the Public Gallery of the House of Commons watching the first ever parliamentary debate on trans rights. For many of you this is doubtless not very exciting, but considering that trans people had no rights at all in the UK when I first transitioned it was a major step forward for me. Here’s a brief report on the day.

I should start by noting how painless it was to get in. The Parliament website warns you that it may take 1 to 2 hours to get a seat. That’s presumably on a busy day. On a Thursday in December with kids in school, tourists thin on the ground, and no high profile business the House was very quiet. The staff were very polite and helpful, and about the only complaint I could have is that the signage was somewhat confusing. At one point a sign told me that I would have to surrender my phone at the cloakroom, but in fact that wasn’t required. All that they ask is that you don’t take photographs. That’s a weird request given that the whole proceedings are televised, but there it is. Tweeting, however, is perfectly OK. Reception was a bit patchy, but I got a lot of tweeting done.

Those of you who have seen the TV coverage may be dismayed at how empty the House was for the debate. However, that was understandable. There was a by election going on that day. The LibDems had a good chance of winning (and did) so all of their people were out canvassing. Large numbers of Tories and Labour MPs were too. Ben Howlett, the Bath MP whom I had talked to at the party in the Speaker’s House the night before, said he had to ask for special permission from his party to attend the debate.

The one group of MPs with no interest in the by election were the Scottish Nationalists, and they were out in force. In fact they outnumbered the rest of the MPs. Alex Salmond joked at one point that they should be able to make use of their majority, but of course there was little substantive business to discuss.

The debate on trans rights was billed as a parliamentary first because previous discussion had been limited to specific issues. When the Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004 MPs were only looking at the narrow issue of legal gender. Although trans people are covered by the Equality Act, there are 8 other protected characteristics that will have had more debate time when the Act was being considered.

We were getting a debate because the Women & Equalities Committee, in the form of its Chair, Maria Miller, has got fed up of government inaction on their Trans Equality Report (published in January). The purpose of the debate was to embarrass the government (ever so slightly, because Miller is a Tory) and encourage them to get on with things.

A few specific things came out of the debate, the most high profile of which is that Ms. Miller introduced a private member’s bill to amend the Equality Act so that it covers “Gender Identity” rather than “Gender Reassignment”. Because the current protected characteristic is tied to people who will have, are having or have had medical treatment, large portions of the trans community are technically uncovered by the Act. Miller’s bill would fix that loophole. The government argues that people are covered if there is a perception that they have the protected characteristic, so there is no need for a change, but that places a much greater burden of proof on those people not having any medical treatment. Also one has to wonder why the government is unwilling to make such a simple, obvious and seemingly uncontroversial change. It remains to be seen how far Ms. Miller’s bill will get.

The SNP announced that 2017 would be the Year of Trans Equality in Scotland. It is as yet unclear what this means. However, SNP speakers were far more radical in their support for trans rights than anyone else. In particular they argued for self-determination of gender, and for gender-neutral passports. Both of these are things the government has firmly rejected. As far as I know, Scotland doesn’t have the right to issue its own passports (yet). However, they do have a lot of their own laws, and a review of those to make space for non-binary people would be a very welcome thing.

For the government, Caroline Dinenage, who is the Minister with specific responsibility for LGBT+ issues, promised to publish an update on the government’s trans equality action plan in 2017. Whether this will actually happen, and if so whether there will be anything concrete in it, remains to be seen. She also noted that the government had committed to an overhaul of the Gender Recognition Act at some point. Hopefully the fact that so many MPs laid into the medical and judicial nature of a process that should be purely bureaucratic will have had some impact on government thinking.

As far as I was concerned, the best thing about the whole day was that MPs from all three of the largest parties spoke warmly and fulsomely in support of trans rights. That’s a massive change from even five years ago. I’m not very confident of actual progress on legislation, but we are now at the point where government has to make excuses for their lack of action while professing to want to make progress. That’s a huge difference, politically speaking, from dismissing the entire idea of trans rights as abhorrent.

Throughout the debate, only one MP spoke against trans rights. That was Labour’s Caroline Flint, who early in the debate tried to derail the whole thing by introducing bathroom panic. The point she tried to make was that women would be at risk from attack by men in gender-neutral toilets, so trans people could only gain rights at the expense of women. This is ridiculous on multiple grounds:

• No one is asking for all toilets to be made gender neutral;
• Many toilets are already gender neutral (Maria Miller gave aircraft as an example) and there is no major problem as a result;
• The sorts of things Flint cited as examples of potential problems are already illegal under existing laws (thank you the SNP member who made this point);
• Contrary to what Flint might believe, trans women are not indistinguishable from “men in dresses” and many of us already use women’s toilets regularly without anyone noticing or being harmed;
• Indeed, those of us with Gender Recognition Certificates already have an absolute legal right to use women’s toilets, and have had for 12 years, so it is a bit late to panic now;
• In any case, in this country, if men want to sneak into women’s toilets to commit assaults, all they have to do is dress as a cleaner;
• In any case, as Maria Miller noted, equality is not a zero sum game; giving some people rights does not mean taking them away from other people.

The last point is crucial. No one in the chamber picked up on this, but by stating that trans people could only have rights at the expense of women Flint was explicitly saying that trans people (of any type) cannot be women.

Of course it was also deeply embarrassing for Labour to have one of their MPs using the same sorts of panic tactics that are favored by extreme right Republicans in the USA. Stephen Doughty, one of the South Wales Labour MPs who spoke in support of trans rights spent about an hour in quiet but animated discussion with Flint after she had been slapped down. Whatever point he was trying to make presumably didn’t get through because as I left Flint was furiously haranguing Hannah Bardell, one of the SNP members who had spoken in the debate. Later she posted a statement saying that she was in favor of trans rights but quoting Sarah Ditum in her support, which is rather like saying you are in favor of immigrants and then favorably quoting Nigel Farage.

If any women readers happen to live in Doncaster and are constituents of Ms. Flint I suggest you drop her a line and ask her to stop being so silly.

In Labour’s defense I should note that several of their MPs spoke in support of trans people and their chief spokesperson on Women and Equalities, Sarah Champion, made one of the best speeches of the debate.

So, that was an historic day. As I noted earlier, nothing concrete may come of it. But politics is very much a game of setting agendas, and that day very much put trans people’s rights on the parliamentary map.

Photo by Tom Renhard via Facebook

Bristol’s TDOR event took place on Friday evening. However, I’d like to start much earlier than that. I was in town by lunchtime because I had been invited to attend a “Corporate Strategy” event at City Hall. Like many councils across the UK, Bristol is facing a massive funding gap as central government withdraws support. The Council is limited by the government in its ability to raise revenue through taxes, so it has little choice but to cut services. Friday’s meeting was an attempt to brainstorm ideas with the voluntary sector as to how the effect of those cuts on minority groups can be minimized.

The meeting took place in the Cash Hall which is in the newly refurbished part of the building. It is on the lower ground floor as you see things from College Green, but there is street-level access at the back. The refurbishment has been very nicely done, but the thing that stood out to me was that all of the toilets in the new section are gender neutral. As far as I know, the Council has made no announcement about this. They just did it, because it seemed an obvious thing to do.

At my request, Mayor Marvin Rees opened proceedings by making mention of the Trans Day of Remembrance events taking place later in the day. It’s not perhaps the level of mayoral enthusiasm for trans support that we saw in Bath, but is good to be recognized.

There’s not much more to say about the meeting because it is very clear that the City Council is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It is very upset about what is happening, but any attempt to push back against government will only result in Bristol being treated more harshly than other major cities who would be seen as more compliant. (Ideally they should work together, but there are 10 “core cities” and I suspect that some of them have Conservative-run councils.)

At 4:30pm we had a flag raising ceremony outside City Hall. Bristol has been doing this for a few years now, but it has got much more complicated to arrange such things since the cuts forced reduction in staff levels and hours. We may have to abandon these in future and just settle for getting the flag up when staff can manage it. At least that will mean we won’t have to stand out in the cold and wet. My thanks to the Lord Mayor for standing patiently while I wittered on about the importance of the event, and to the chap from the Council’s LGBT staff group who helped do the actual flag raising (which isn’t as easy as it looks).

From there we went on the Bristol University Students’ Union, where the amazing Jamie Cross had once again secured a fabulous venue for the TDOR ceremony. Sarah Minter from LGBT Bristol once again provided food and drinks for the attendees, and also provided me with transport for which I am deeply grateful.

Special thanks are also due to a number of people who helped out massively this year. Charlie Oxborough did the work of collapsing the official document from Transgender Europe into something more manageable for printing and reading. Alfie Green helped me read the list of names of the departed. Al, a trans person from Devon who happened to be in town for the day, came and sang a lovely song. And the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence added a splash of color to the event.

We had around 75 people at the event (folks were coming and going as I was reading so it was hard to get an accurate count). The University people, and Henry and the kids from Freedom Youth, made up a large proportion of that. One person (thanks Katie!) came all the way from Portsmouth, and of course Brother Bimbo came all the way from Edinburgh.

As always at these things I want to make clear that the day is not about me. If other people want to take more of a leading role I’ll be happy to hand over to them. In particular I would love to be able to stand aside and let a trans woman of color take charge. My primary qualification for being the public face of the event is that I’m sufficiently hard-hearted to be able to stand there and read all of those names without cracking up.

Normally I try to keep the event fairly sombre, but a conversation with the Lady Mayoress of Bath on Thursday made me realize that I needed to end on a message of hope, given how worried trans people are about the potential effects of Brexit and Trump. I can’t print my speech because it was all off the cuff, but essentially what I said was this.

Back when I transitioned, in the 1990s, trans people had no civil rights. There was no Gender Recognition Act, and no Equality Act. I still transitioned, because I had to, but I had no expectation of fair treatment and my family expected me to be dead within a few years. I survived. Not because I am “brave” or “inspiring” or any of the ridiculous epithets that the media likes to label us with, but because I had friends, and because there were plenty of people who were happy to accept me for who I was. Even if May and Trump take away all of our hard-won rights, we will still have the community that we have built over the past two decades, and we will still have many friends and supporters. We need to remember that in the days to come.

The media fuss over trans kids has reached both Parliament, with the Jurassic wing of the Tory party calling for a ban on talking to children about trans issues, and the BBC. Susie Green of Mermaids was on Newsnight last night to discuss the issue. Sadly she didn’t manage to have sensible conversation because she was put on with a TERF who seemed determined to set a new record for the number of untruths uttered in a single interview.

The TERF woman they had on was the same person who, at the Westminster meeting in September, stood up and accused Gendered Intelligence of going into schools and persuading children to become trans, despite the fact that Jay Stewart had just said that GI’s philosophy was to let children find their own path.

On Newsnight she once again came out with the claim that children were being “sterilized”. Standard NHS practice is not to provide cross-sex hormones until the patients are at least 16. Surgery is not permitted until the patient is 18. No medicines are provided until the child is obviously starting puberty.

Much hand-wringing is currently happening over the effects of puberty blockers. These are reversible, in that if you come off them puberty proceeds as normal. We don’t have lifetime studies of people who take these yet, though Susie’s daughter is a happy adult woman now. What never gets mentioned in such discussions is that these medicines were not developed for treating trans kids, they were developed for treating what the medical professional called “precocious puberty”; that is when kids start to go through puberty at a very young age. No one complains about safety in those cases. It is only when they are prescribed to trans kids that we get this panic.

The other massive whopper that the TERF came out with is that 80% of children who are diagnosed as trans later regret it and transition back. This again is completely untrue. The TERFs are always wringing their hands about how kids might be incorrectly diagnosed as trans, but when faced with evidence that the vast majority of kids referred to clinics are diagnosed as not trans they insist on labeling all of these kids as “regretters”.

Clearly there will be a grey area in the case of kids who will grow up to be happily non-binary and don’t need medical intervention, but clinics are becoming better with time at identifying who needs what treatment. By far the best diagnostic yardstick is what the child says about their gender. Those are also the kids who insist on transitioning fully at a young age. The others tend to be happy going to school in the gender they were assigned at birth, though they’d doubtless be even happier if schools were less gender-obsessed.

Then there was the claim that chromosomes are the ultimate indicator of “sex” and that “sex” cannot be changed. This again is scientific nonsense. There are plenty of people who were assigned female at birth and are living happily as women despite having Y chromosomes. Sex is as much a social construct as gender. There are specific physical attributes that are commonly associated with sex, but many of those can be changed, and their absence is not proof of gender. For example, women who cannot give birth do not suddenly become men.

These days some TERFs have taken to saying that they are not opposed to “genuine” trans people. The woman on Newsnight said this, though it was by no means clear what she meant by it. In any case, you can’t be in favor of “genuine” trans people if you insist that treatment should be denied to all trans kids, regardless of how strongly they identify. They know as well as we do that withholding treatment leads to suicides.

Then there is the hand-wringing that goes on about why can’t we just let children dress and behave how they want without “forcing” them to transition. Well we do. That’s the whole point. The trouble is that if the kid absolutely insists that their gender is other than that assigned at birth then the TERFs insist on forcing them to behave in the stereotyped way associated with their birth gender in order to “cure” them of being trans.

Which brings us to this whole conversion therapy thing. We keep getting told how impressionable children are, and that if we talk to them honestly about issues of sexuality and gender then that will somehow cause kids to become gay or trans. If that was true, then surely the decades we have had of people trying to cure kids of being gay or trans would have shown lots of success stories. In practice conversion therapy normally ends in failure or in the suicide of the patient. It is widely regarded as dangerous in the case of LGB people. Yet the likes of Helen Lewis, Sarah Ditum and Julie Bindel still promote it for trans kids. The only other enthusiastic supporter of the technique I can think of right now is Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate. One of these days I hope that the TERFs will think long and hard about the company they keep.

The more I hear about this case, the more unhappy I get. Susie Green of Mermaids has posted a comment to a tabloid newspaper today. I don’t want to link to them, but she has copied it to Facebook. You may need a Facebook login to read that. In case you can’t here are some key points.

Two independent gender specialists have attested that the child’s gender issues are real and are not being encouraged by the mother. This is not mentioned in the judgement, in which the judge appears to blame the mother for the child being trans.

A claim that the mother is a drug user is included in the judgement, despite the fact that it is anonymous and has not been substantiated.

The judge has banned the mother from defending herself against any of the charges made against her.

The Tavistock gender clinic, which has been treating the child, was not consulted for an opinion on the case.

Susie says, “The Mum was subjected to multiple malicious anonymous referrals to social services.” This is a common experience for parents of trans children. The judge appears to have taken all of these complaints as valid and reasonable.

Susie says that meetings were called by the school and GP to discuss the child’s welfare, without the knowledge of the mother. The clear implication being that both school and GP were treating the mother as a danger to the child. But it is only the mother whom the judge criticizes for being uncooperative.

There was no careful handover of care – the child was taken from their mother in a raid in the middle of the night and taken to live with a father they had not seen for 3 years.

Susie says, “This child consistently and repeatedly asserted that she was a girl.” This is not included in the judgement, but a single claim by a teacher that the child claimed to be a boy is included.

There appears to be something very underhand going on here, and sadly I believe that the same tactics will now be used against other parents of trans children, and against anyone in schools and social services who tries to help them. Please sign the petition.

Last night and this morning my Twitter mentions have been full of outrage about a High Court judgement to remove a child from the care of their mother because of concerns that said child was being abused by being allowed to present as female. There’s news coverage here.

I’ve had a chance to look through the official judgement this morning. It doesn’t make for pretty reading. I have an awful lot of questions, some of which may be answered as more information comes to light.

To start with, this case seems to be part of an acrimonious dispute between the biological parents of the child who are now separated. The case seems to have revolved entirely around the question as to whether the father or mother was correct with regard to whether the child is a boy or a girl. A child’s welfare should never come down to taking sides in such a case.

I note also that there appears to have been zero consideration that both parents might be correct. There is good evidence these days that children can have strong cross-gender identification at a very early age. However, many children are ambivalent about their gender. Forcing them to choose one or the other can be just as harmful as forcing them to make the “wrong” choice between binary genders.

I am wondering where the expert testimony is. A “Consultant Clinical Psychologist” was employed to assess the child, but there is no suggestion that she is an expert in gender issues. The child is apparently a patient at the Tavistock gender clinic, but no one from the Tavi is mentioned as giving evidence. Mermaids have stated that they have been supporting the mother and child for over two years, but there is no mention of them being asked to give evidence.

I’m struck also by the way in which the mother’s attempts to protect her child have been used against her. When the child was bullied she tried to keep them away from the bullies, and was accused of isolating the child. When she tried to allow the child to start social life again in a new environment where the child was known only as a girl, which is standard practice for raising trans kids, this too was condemned by the judge on the grounds that someone might find out. He described it as:

an arrangement that was fraught with potential for real harm to J if his true gender was inadvertently discovered

I submit that in referring to the child’s “true gender” the judge is showing obvious bias.

What is most disturbing about this case, however, is the way in which the judge gives equal weight to the opinions of people who know nothing about trans issues to those of the mother and the various agencies attempting to help her. A local authority report is quoted as saying:

It is evident that some agencies do not have a full understanding of gender non conforming children and have therefore contacted Children’s Service, sometimes when they have not met [J].

The judge responds to this with:

The two remaining passages of the conclusion make very disheartening reading indeed. They combine both naivety and professional arrogance.

I can see no basis for this comment other than that he feels he knows the “true gender” of the child. There are lots of attempts to appeal to the views of other agencies, all of which have a lot of experience with children, but none that appear to have much awareness of trans issues.

As anyone who has worked with trans children will tell you, there is a vast amount of ignorance out there. Schools, health care professionals, government agencies and voluntary services of all sorts are full of people whose view of trans people have been shaped by reading tabloid newspapers. They will often “raise concerns” solely on the grounds that they don’t believe that being trans is a real thing, or in the case of schools because they are unwilling to deal with the complications that having trans pupils entails.

Much of this reminds me of when I was a kid. My brother had very severe dyslexia, and my mum spent a great deal of her time fighting against schools and other agencies. At the time she was accused of being taken in by a popular fad that everyone with any common sense knew wasn’t real. The same sort of thing happens to parents of trans children today.

It is deeply concerning that the judge has used this case to attack the social workers who attempted to support the child’s mother. This sort of thing could easily end their careers, and it will have a chilling effect on every similar case around the country. All it will take is for some transphobic doctor or school teacher to “raise concerns” that a child is being raised in an inappropriate way and social services will have to react for fear that they too will be accused of abetting “child abuse”.

There is a petition about the case here. I make no claims to knowing how the child should be raised, but I think it entirely wrong that such issues should be decided in court, and am horrified at many of the comments by the judge.

Update: From Susie Green of Mermaids on Facebook

There have been 2 independent gender specialists who have reviewed the family and agreed that Mum is not responsible for her child’s gender expression.